Joint Garda/RUC training slammed
Sinn Féin TD Caoimhghín O'Caoláin has reacted angrily to news that the Gardái are next week to host 60 RUC members at a special training session for three days at the garda training centre at Templemore, County Tipperary.
``It is an outrage that the Gardaí invited the RUC to a training session,'' said O Caoláin. ``The news comes in the wake of the refusal of the Director of Public Prosecutions in the Six Counties to prosecute those RUC members who sat idly in their Land Rover and watched as a loyalist mob beat Robert Hamill to death in 1997.
``It is widely accepted that the RUC are a sectarian force guilty of human rights abuses, collusion, shoot to kill and torture. It is offensive to those who have suffered at the hands of the RUC that the Gardaí are now attempting to rehabilitate them. It is a gross insult to these people that this visit should be described as `training in peacekeeping'.
``I call on the Minster for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, John O'Donoghue to order that this training operation be cancelled immediately.''
It has also recently come to light that, in a crassly insensitive development, the Gardaí and RUC held a golf tournament entitled the `Nelson Challenge Golf Trophy' within a few miles of the scene of the assassination of human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson. RUC collusion in the murder of Rosemary Nelson is widely suspected.
Twenty-seven members of the gardai and 28 RUC members took part in the event at Portadown Golf Club on Thursday, 26 August, as nationalists of the Garvaghy Road in Portadown remained under siege from loyalist mobs.
To use the Nelson name, albeit coincidentally, with an event so explicitly linked with the RUC, particularly in Portadown, will cause deep offence to the local nationalist community. While the cynicism of the RUC in this instance will come as no surprise, the involvement of the Gardaí is certain to provoke outrage and raises further questions about their policy of co-operation with such a sectarian and discredited force as the RUC.
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